A turbulent border, a cooperative spirit

The ever-challenging relationship between the U.S. and Mexico is not quite as pretty as Presidents Bush and Vicente Fox painted at their two-day summit meeting in Cancun last week.

Indeed, it was difficult at times to reconcile their mutual praise and admiration with the debate raging across the U.S. over how to treat the country's 12 million undocumented immigrants, many of them from Mexico.

And there are a host of other issues that dog the two countries: the shrill criticism of how Mexico patrols its borders, Mexican angst at talk of constructing a border "wall," and weekly irritants along the Rio Grande.

In truth, there are many things that work in the complicated reality of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, despite all the anti-Mexico, anti-U.S. and anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding the election campaigns this year in both countries.

Behind the finger-pointing about border violence, drug trafficking and illegal immigrants pouring over the U.S. border, a functioning partnership chugs along in fits and starts, low-key and often out of sight. It is a cooperation driven by the necessities of an increasingly populated 2,000-mile border.

Consider:

- As American anti-immigrant activists cast doubts on Mexico's seriousness about post-Sept. 11 border security, the Mexican government last month quietly allowed U.S. agents to "escort" a South Korean businessman on a flight from Mexico City to Houston. Once there, he was arrested on charges related to assisting Saddam Hussein in the United Nations' scandal-plagued oil-for-food program.

- As Mexican presidential candidates joined anti-American radicals in condemning the border-fence idea, the two governments last month announced a plan to jointly combat tuberculosis and AIDS along the border.

- As Texas sheriffs decried shootouts among drug smugglers across the Rio Grande, Fox announced last week that Mexico soon would begin extraditing its worst kingpins to the U.S., warning that the powerful drug lords would probably unleash even more violence in Mexico to prevent it. Mexico does hunt down and return fugitive murderers to the U.S., although sometimes the government would rather not publicize it too much.

It is those functional elements of the "friendship" that Bush and Fox sought to highlight at the summit, partly in an attempt to convince the U.S. Congress that Mexico could be trusted. For this moment, at least, they sought to overlook the clashing interests, cultures and shortcomings that always will prevent one side from completely pleasing the other.

"We are arriving at a level of maturity in the relationship," said Silvia Hernandez, president of the Mexican Senate's North American Affairs Committee. "We have stopped just saying, `It's your problem.'

"We have serious problems along the border. Does that make the relationship bad? I would say it demands that the relationship be good, because the incidents get bigger every time."

Political change expected

One concern of U.S. officials is that this may be as good as it gets. When Fox leaves office after elections this year, the next government may be headed by a left-wing nationalist with a defiant streak, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who may not look as kindly on what the U.S. stands for and does.

While the border incidents often are deadly and dangerous, the tensions aren't so unlike those of two neighbors with vastly different income levels and lifestyles, eyeing each other suspiciously over the fence, neither quite confident that the other has chained up the pit bull. But in this case, no one's in a position to pack up and move.

The cultural differences--between Americans' individualism and focus on orderliness and the Mexicans' collective instincts and informality--often make it hard for the two peoples to appreciate each other's interests and points of view.

"The average Mexican really likes the average American," said Carlos Tortolero, executive director of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, who was born in Mexico. "It's when the U.S. uses its big clout that it drives the Mexicans crazy."

A recent survey by Zogby International and Mexico's Center of Investigation for Development illustrated the disparity in perspectives, suggesting that Americans on average have a far better opinion of Mexicans than vice versa.

Only 26 percent of Mexicans thought Americans were hardworking. Only 16 percent thought Americans were honest. And a full 73 percent thought Americans were racist.

By contrast, 78 percent of Americans thought Mexicans were hardworking and 42 percent thought they were honest.

While many Americans see Mexico as corrupt and inept at employing its people despite having billions of dollars in annual oil revenues, many Mexicans see America as arrogant, hypocritical and the cause of many of their problems.

A recent political cartoon in a Mexico City newspaper summed it up. It captured John Negroponte, the U.S. intelligence director, testifying to Congress that Mexico is the No. 1 source of drugs to the U.S. Sitting next to him is a long-haired, hippie-like American drug addict, under a cloud of marijuana smoke, saying, "Yeah, man, we need more and at a better price."

Simmering beneath it all is that old resentment in Mexico about the loss of Texas and California. It's seen in the flashing eyes of a Spanish tutor when she boasts about how Mexican immigrants are slowly taking the land back, or in the Mexican flags waved by marchers in Los Angeles and Chicago protesting Congress' proposed crackdown on illegal immigrants.

"From the historical perspective of Mexico, the line between Mexico and the U.S. is not just a border; it is a scar that has never quite healed over," wrote Daniel Lund, an American pollster who has lived in Mexico with his Mexican wife for 30 years, in a recent newspaper column.

But at a 150-year distance from those events, others have learned to laugh about the historical grievance.

"One of the first things that Mexicans learn in primary school is that the U.S. stole our territory, and because of that we're not developed," Jorge Chabat, an expert in border issues, kidded me over lunch not long after I arrived in Mexico City. "And oh, those gringos! They took the best part-- the part with the good highways, the shopping malls and Disneyland!"

All the talk about building walls between the U.S. and Mexico reminds me of one of the last conversations I had before ending my stint as the Tribune's correspondent in Jerusalem in 2002.

Relatively peaceful border

After learning I was moving to Mexico, an Israeli neighbor cocked an eyebrow and asked over brunch how the U.S. and Mexico can get along so well after the Americans ended up with so much of Mexico's land.

Of course, the Iraqi-born Jew was thinking of the far different situation between the Israelis and Palestinians, who are now separated by a wall.

From his perspective, the U.S.-Mexico relationship looked pretty good.